admittedly inherent in the very nature and constitution of human thought. Whatever may be the success of such an attempt in other directions, it has been my contention that in the ethical region at least the attempt has conspicuously failed that the very writers who startle us with their discoveries about the non-moral character of Reality and the absolute or relative beauty of sin and misery, really employ in their thought about the relation of the real to Morality the very conceptions and ideals which they profess to discredit, and that they are arbitrary and inconsistent in using them up to a certain point and no further. The attempt to transcend, as they have made it, really involves actual contradiction, and if our moral judgments express as much of the true nature of Reality as any human judgments can do, we shall not get nearer to that nature by such contradiction. There is one particular source of imperfection in our knowledge to which a momentary reference must be made. It will, doubtless, be contended that my argument has assumed the absolute validity of our ideas of Time. Here, too, the real problem is as to the amount and kind of inadequacy which is involved in this particular condition of human thought. What I should contend, if I had the opportunity, would be that our time-distinctions must express, however inadequately, the true nature of Reality, and that the attempt to think of Reality as out of time or timeless is certain to lead us further astray from the truth than the assertion that time-distinctions are valid, though we cannot tell in what way they present themselves to God or how far they express the full truth about Reality as a whole. If the position that Reality is out of time makes it impossible to ascribe objective validity to our judgments of value, compels us to distort and virtually contradict the ethical part of our thought, and forbids us to give its proper weight to that side of our nature in our speculative construction of ultimate Reality, that is one further objection to such theories. The doctrine of a timeless Reality makes the world's history unmeaning and all human effort vain. The Buddhists, to whose Creed our modern believers in a timeless Absolute so often appeal, at least have the merit of admitting that corollary of their system, however much inconsistency and contradiction there may be in the anti-social ascetic's effort to escape from effort. The Western who uses this language about the vanity of all that is temporal neither believes it nor acts as if he believed it. Time and its distinctions, as we know them, may not express the whole truth about the Universe and the ultimate spiritual ground of it, but at least they must express more of it than a to us meaningless negation like timelessness. If there be any meaning in the idea of transcending timedistinctions, that meaning must be something other than that of merely negating and abolishing them, and it is only on the assumption that from the point of view of absolute knowledge time-distinctions are simply negated and abolished that the temporal character of our moral thinking can be used as an argument for denying its objective validity and the postulates which that objective validity carries with it. II. THE LINE OF ADVANCE IN PHILOSOPHY. By HENRY STURT. IT will seem unusual and perhaps even presumptuous to attempt to indicate the line along which philosophy is to develop in the immediate future. In the past thinkers have made advances without any clear notion whither they were going; and it has been left for historians to point out the logical connection of one stage with another. But I do not see why philosophy in this more self-conscious age should not advance self-consciously-why it should not choose a definite line and try to get further by it. It is rather characteristic of contemporary thinking to make such a deliberate choice, well aware that the standpoint chosen is neither all-comprehensive or final. The old philosophers were haunted by the phantom of finality; each great system-maker dreamed that his system was the term in which the human mind would at last find rest. We have flung away finality. We confess, indeed desire, that our synthesis, into which we put our best just now, may have its chief use in leading on to the ampler syntheses of the future. The line of advance which I should like philosophy to take, and which I believe it actually will take, consists primarily in recognising more fully than hitherto the importance of striving in human experience. If this be so, the philosophy of the future will be a form of Voluntarism, but it will differ not inconsiderably from the forms of the past. The striving I have in view is not the impersonal cosmic striving of Schopenhauer and his followers, but the personal striving which is known to us by introspection and by common observation of the people around us. So far from being a blind irrational force, it has the consciousness which belongs to human purpose, and it grows in rationality as our purposes grow clearer. And on another side the line of thought I advocate differs from a subjectivist voluntarism like that of Fichte in its view of the objective world. It accepts the scientific position that we live in a world of forces which act upon us, some of which we strive to direct to the furtherance of our own purposes. The establishment of a philosophy of striving would amount to a revolution of English thought, because the philosophy still dominant among us is based on principles which ignore the kinetic and dynamic element in nature and man. The tendency still exists to speak of nature as though it were statical in essence, however mutable it might appear. In early thought such a tendency can be easily explained. Science is based on the discovery of uniformities in the flux of phenomena ; and this predisposed the early thinkers to concentrate attention upon the uniformities, to emphasise them as the true realities, and to speak slightingly of the mutable concrete facts as unreal. No less statical in reality, though in appearance recognising movement, is the dominant conception of the human spirit. We have, it is true, got rid of the wax-tablet theory which left man no function in forming his own thoughts. But are the current principles any real improvement? Professor Bosanquet's favourite phrase, the self-determination of thought, seems to countenance the Hegelian doctrine of category spinning itself out from category by an inherent necessity or immanent dialectic. Mr. Bradley's doctrine of the self-realisation of ideas seems to make the mind a mere playground for alien creatures, called ideas, to disport themselves in. Is it possible to ignore more completely the most important features of man, of his environment, and of the relation between them? When we once have grasped the principle, so indispensable for science, that there are permanent, or at least persistent, uniformities in material nature, there is no need to shrink from recognising that, in its concrete presentation, it consists of things constantly in motion and charged with force. Natural forces are constantly impinging on us: they destroy us if we do not react against them, and they are capable of being diverted to serve our ends. And the self, on the other hand, is not an impressionable wax-tablet or an empty playground or a chain of categories. It is a creative force, different in kind from material forces, yet capable of interacting with them: and it develops not merely logically but practically (if such an antithesis is possible) by conative interaction with the material environment and with other selves. This characteristic of striving never entirely ceases in each man's life, so long as he is fully himself: and every important concept, every important function of his nature, is penetrated by it through and through. It is in developing the significance of striving over the whole field of thought that the advance I anticipate will be accomplished. To enunciate a wide-reaching general principle is easy enough; the great achievement is its application in detail. If Voluntarism were applied in detail it would change everything that the dominant school of thought now takes for granted. The effect of such a change would be, as I believe, to bring philosophy much nearer to reality, and to dispel that unfortunate air of paradox which has clung to philosophy for ages, but of which few understand the secret. It may clear up still further the import of this form of voluntarism if I mention what I regard as its philosophic antecedents. The first is Idealism, as that term has been understood in Oxford for the last 40 years or so. Fluctuating as its meaning is, I think that this term means to most of us who use it nothing more dogmatically definite than that the world is to be interpreted by spirit rather than by matter. I do not use it to imply any "cheap and easy" reduction of matter to spirit; but I do imply that, if we are to have a monism, it must be spiritual, not materialistic like Haeckel's. Taking this view, I would be understood to concur with the |